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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30985 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Update of previous culture war post in May 1 thread.

The contentious marker was removed without any ceremony and all dwindled into nothingness.

Maybe other more cinematic events, like New York Subway Thunderdome fight, stole the limelight, maybe the whole thing was just too obscure to turn into major culture war battlefield.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn is still dead and so are most of causes she dedicated her life for. Causes like communism, that moved hundreds of millions and turned the Earth asunder, are now just forgotten or reduced to cosplay attire.

As will happen to all of us, as will happen to every cause we hold dear.

Causes like communism, that moved hundreds of millions and turned the Earth asunder, are now just forgotten or reduced to cosplay attire.

Communism wasn't that big in the US in the first place, it seems like it being forgotten in the US isn't much evidence in favour of it being forgotten in the places where those hundreds of millions were moved.

I suspect you are being too optimistic to say communism is "forgotten". It may be temporarily out of power in the West, but its twin brother under the name "socialism" is still going strong all over the planet, while true commies bide their time in classrooms and government-funded NGOs, and entertain themselves destroying cities like Portland. They are far from gone and forgotten.

I'd go so far as to say that the basics of Communism are orthodoxy today, as witness all the complaints about "inequality" without even any attempt to justify "inequality" being somehow wrong.

I don't think striving for "equality" as such is bad.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I don't think Jefferson was a communist for writing this.

It's the conclusions that you make - whether equality means "you have your opportunity, as any other person, and the responsibility for its use" or "if my results are worse than his results then the reason is oppression, because we're supposed to be equal".

Again, this is equivocation on "equality". The kind of "inequality" that's constantly bemoaned today isn't what Jefferson was talking about. Nor is it inequality under the law, which Jefferson was in part bemoaning (yes, including the slaves, if you read his draft). It's inequality of income or of wealth. That's a lot closer to Communism.

The kind of "inequality" that's constantly bemoaned today isn't what Jefferson was talking about.

Correct, but this is a recent thing I think. The Marxists largely took over what used to be the civil rights movement, so now they are only talking about redistribution. Helpfully, they invented a new word for it - "equity" - there you could be sure we're talking not about rights but about redistribution, with idpol angle attached.

"Equity" usually refers to redistribution or preferential rulesets according to race, sex, or gender-related characteristic of the week. The complaining about "inequality", or often enough the talk about it that just assumes it is a problem, appears much more broadly.

It is interesting to note that it seems to be that there's certainly "inequality" in use, but there's never "equality" - I mean, to fix "inequality", you are supposed to fight for "equity", not "equality" - in fact, the last time "equality" has been used is "marriage equality", but it seems to be out of the woke lingo otherwise. I take it as a sign that actual inequality of rights is gone (one can debate about marriage question actually being a question of equality, but whatever it is, the battle is already won - or lost, depending on your side - and the question is closed), even when looking from the woke side, and "inequality" now is a strictly redistributionist term.

Nah, men being born equal goes back to the founding of the US. Funny people like Moldbug might twist their words torturously to put the founding fathers in the same category as the communists, but most anyone else can see how ridiculous that really is.

"Inequality" isn't about "all men are created equal"; that's blatant equivocation. Jefferson did not mean, and no one thought he meant, that everyone should have the same amount of income or wealth.

The inequality of the day, as well as of a small century afterward, was certainly about men being created equal - and it still is in our day and age now the left has joined the right in attacking this notion by insisting it is evil white/male/straight/whatever people being uniquely evil. Equality takes more shapes and forms than underachieving Americans doing poorly, and to insist only the communists might take issue with inequality is silly.

to insist only the communists might take issue with inequality is silly.

But, in the expanded sense of "inequality" you are using, nobody is doing that.

Don't worry, Western Marxism is still alive an doing well. Just wait until the oppressed take control of means of [cultural] production - then we will solve all the contradictions, including those that soviet style communists could not resolve.

It'd be great if we did more retrospective culture war stuff, to see what the conclusion of various episodes was.

On the other hand, we are in a Cold War with a debatably communist party that might be doing the whole 'go through all the stages before socialism' idea that Marx originally proposed, before Lenin came up with the vanguard party concept.

Right, and Deng was China's Right Opposition, implementing what was basically Buharin's programme.

But Marx was quite clear that revolution was supposed to happen in the most developed countries, countries like Britain and Germany then. Or perhaps China in 30-50 years time once it's reached the highest stage of capitalist development. That's what Xi says, that's Xi Xinping Thought and Orthodox Marxism in a nutshell. You can't skip stages, you couldn't take a semi-feudal economy like Russia and go straight to socialism and on to communism. You have to finish capitalism first.

Now I don't think this is what's actually happening, or how things could work even in theory. But that's what their theory says.

deleted

I really like Tanner Greer of The Scholar's Stage for stuff like this. He spent a bunch of time living in China and frequently translates CCP documents into English and analyzes their contents. He seems to care quite dearly about the modern political philosophy of the CCP.

The link's bad, putting a https:// in front should fix it.

As will happen to all of us, as will happen to every cause we hold dear.

This is why you should dedicate your life to causes that have survived for thousands of years, such as Catholicism or shipbuilding, since the longer a thing has existed, the more likely it is to continue to exist.

As one historian put it, the NAUTILUS was Admiral Rickover's pyramid.

In the fossil record you find that the longer a species has survived has no correlation with how long it will survive in the future.

I'd imagine it's subject to diminishing returns. Once something has lasted a certain length of time, that means that it's immune to most of the forces that it's possible to become immune to. Lasting longer than that doesn't make it immune to more forces.

If something even counts as a species, it's been around long enough for that to happen, so I wouldn't expect length of species existence to be correlated with survival.

The corresponding idea for causes would be something like "people have built ships for much longer than they have been Catholics, but shipbuilding and Catholicism are equally likely to survive". This may or may not be true but it's at least plausible. But that doesn't extend to things that have been around for short enough periods of time that diminishing returns haven't set in. It still makes sense to say "shipbuilding has been around a lot longer than Communism, so it'll probably last longer".

So just be lindy?

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